


No right to pray

by Lilliburlero



Category: Cal (1984), The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Northern Ireland, Northern Irish Troubles, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:36:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26111245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Time was when, believe it not, if you had a confirmed heid-the-baw on your hands, you called in Jim Burns.
Relationships: Jim Burns/Stella Gibson
Kudos: 7





	No right to pray

Time was when, believe it not, if you had a confirmed heid-the-baw on your hands, you called in Jim Burns. Because he was a wee bit of a heid-the-baw himself: the South Armagh Catholic who’d joined the RUC in 1983, Year of the Supergrass, of the Maze escapes, the Darkley massacre. Stella had never sounded more English than when she said to him _do you carry that stuff about bombs and shootings around in your head?_ (Not even when she said Gallagher with both gs, which didn’t stop him wincing every time she did it.) He’d nearly replied with an incredulous _Who the fuck doesn’t, round here?_ but of course the number of people with a mental Troubles-to-Gregorian-Calendar ready reckoner was dwindling steadily, and no longer included most of the younger members of the force. Anderson would have been eight years of age at the first IRA ceasefire. Fuck.

Back in the day, Jim’s mild manner, soulful eyes and steady, low voice unsettled people into admission and confession: the Prods who assumed his either-side-of-the-house name and denatured accent meant he was one of them, the fellow Taigs who assumed it didn’t, until it suited him to drop some marker. (He favoured spelling the letter H aloud, literal shibboleth). Now it seemed they were all at it, calm, measured, poised, even when confronted by the worst atrocity and perversion: he wanted to shake them, say _that’s me, that’s mine, I fucking invented that, perfected it, and you don’t even know why you’re doing it_. 

The _Chronicle_ , profiling him when he was promoted ACC, sneered _an uncanny prescience_ , as if he’d seen the direction of flow and just gone with it. But it hadn’t been like that at all. Mostly it had been ugly, cross-grained scrabble against the current, all the while trying to look serene, like the swans on the Lagan (bad bastards, break a man’s arm). Sometimes it had been pure shit creek without a paddle. All of it, from the first, had been animated by his half-delirious belief in a true civilian force, policing by consent, accountable to the communities it served, and that the way to get _there_ , in the face of all available evidence, was in fact by _starting from here_. 

That had been the sticking point with his parents and siblings—hardly raging Provos, they wouldn’t have minded him becoming a cop if he’d had the decency to go to England, or down South. But that was exactly the sort of evasive bullshit he felt, at twenty-two, he’d been put on this earth to stand against. The estrangement lasted seventeen years, during which he acquired a large Alliance Party wife and family, a handsome South Belfast town house, and his father died. And _suddenly, almost accidentally_ —for which read, _at long last, having thanklessly toiled at the whole civil society racket when it was neither profitable nor popular_ —he was not just perfectly placed to survive the purges and restructurings, but exactly what the PSNI was gagging for. A poster boy. His rise was meteoric, stunning, stellar. He became as much politician as policeman, and under the new dispensation compromised himself in the exact ways he’d ensured his elevation by avoiding. That was middle-aged respectability. Sordid little deals with Morgan Monroe. Naggins of Smirnoff, 12 slow and halting steps. Stella.

Stella. He liked women with soft, pillowy bodies and bold, resilient minds, witty women who wore ever so slightly the wrong sort of clothes and laughed as they tumbled out of them. Women like his wife, whose descent seemed almost exclusively matrilineal, with only the merest necessary input from the male. How he’d contrived to get up on the brittle, humourless backside of a daddy’s girl who unselfconsciously wore a floor-length satin dressing gown as she sipped a post-coital cognac, and was, beneath the cool veneer, terrifyingly vulnerable and fragile, was an entire mystery to him. But he had, and what’s more, he wanted to do it again, and again and again. Really, really, really fucking wanted to do it again. Even though she’d lamped him a fine one when he tried. He shivered: it was not, in the context of Spector, a very comforting thing to think about your _type_.

And now Stella was at the same crack, using Anderson on the Benedetto girl, sending McNally in to interview Spector with her hair down, her blouse unbuttoned and her fingernails tinted red. He was surprised: it seemed too crude for her, and certainly for Spector. But sometimes crudity worked. Like everything else, he’d done it himself. His first major investigation—it was his idea to utilise his striking resemblance to the lad who’d driven for Robert Morton’s murderers and wormed his way into the victim's household, ending up by screwing the widow. Just to see what he could pump her for really, which had turned out to be nothing. Majella Morton was like Stella, insofar as an Antrim-hinterlands librarian could be _like Stella_ —petite and crisp. He hadn’t felt a thing as he smiled shyly at her from under the floppy fringe he wore then, squeezed her cold hand, brought her cups of tea, and all it had done was fuck her up even more. She hadn't a clue about any of it. The one it had worked on, unnervingly, was Skeffington, the quiet fanatic, the soft-voiced, stone-eyed ideologue, his first skirmish with the personality type of which, for him, Fiachra Jensen, and not Paul Spector, represented the apotheosis. Made you wonder what plans Skeffington had for Cathal McCluskey, quite apart from the Cause. But he had been acquitted on a technicality, and the boy got fourteen years. 

Jim wondered whether McCluskey and he still looked alike, if they met now would he see himself mirrored back in badgery hair and eyes as deep set as a snowman’s coals, in crow’s feet and the regretful fissure in his beard that was his mouth, his heavy head and the rustic, shabby way he’d started to inhabit his clothes almost as soon as he could afford expensive ones. South Armagh would out, he supposed. And McCluskey wouldn’t be wearing Ralph Lauren and Burberry. His life had been ruined before it had properly begun, though not as early as the Gortnacul boys’ had been. Jim’s eyelids were heavy, but he knew if he closed them, he would see that gaudy Axminster carpet, with its phantom pattern under the mythological, Edenic foliage, each white spatter of which was one overlay of release and pleasure with sick shame and humiliation. _Self-abuse, pollution_. Those were the words of his adolescence too, but Jensen had made him feel them in his bones, and they were still eating away at the marrow.

He finished the naggin and opened another. Before it was gone he was slumped over the desk, head on his arms. Somewhere, a record player—a _gramophone_ —yammered tinnily _if I ha—ad possession—over Judgement Da—ay_. He was walking along the boreen leading from his mother’s house, gaining on the mountain until it filled his gaze. There was someone standing at the bus-stop, where the boreen joined with the main road. As he got closer he saw it was Cal McCluskey, though he did not look as he had all those years ago, and nor did he look like Jim, then or now.

McCluskey extended his hand. Jim had forgotten his guitarist’s talons, but there they were. Jim took a deep, long, silent breath, but there wasn’t really a decision to be made. The bargain had been struck, the debt incurred, all those years ago, and now it was being called in.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: from Robert Johnson, 'If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day'
> 
> spelling the letter H aloud: Northern Irish Catholics say 'haitch' and Protestants say 'aitch'.
> 
> [Wee baby John Lynch](https://images.app.goo.gl/sNehqwcY7T2LSGiB6) in _Cal_ (well worth a watch).


End file.
